I have two daughters. Strike that. I have two extremely judgmental daughters. Like (their word), ridiculously judgmental. Like, monstrously. In fact, I would say they’re probably just about the most judgmental daughters it’s possible to have. They are 20 and 18, respectively, and for the purposes of comic effect I shall simply call them Judgmental Child A and Judgmental Child B.

When they were a lot younger (indeed, when I was a lot younger), I naively thought that I would be cool dad. Unlike my father and his father before him, I would be cool. I had a fancy job, had links to the fashion industry, was on nodding terms with half a dozen pop stars and could lay my hands on tickets for gigs, film premieres and the normal kind of stuff that most people in the media can access, should they choose to. Honestly, how difficult could it be to be cool dad? Cool Dad, even? In CAPS! COOL DAD!

Child A had just had her fourth birthday when I was unceremoniously made aware that I wasn’t cool at all

But it wasn’t long before I was disavowed of this. In all honesty I think Judgmental Child A had just had her fourth birthday when I was unceremoniously made aware that I wasn’t cool at all, not by a long stretch of the imagination. No. While she liked the access, cavalcade of strange people who regularly traipsed through the house (some of whom she recognised from television) and the occasional party she was allowed to attend, no, she didn’t think I was cool at all.

I was, simply a dad. Any dad. NOT EVEN IN CAPS.

This dismissiveness made itself even more apparent when both Judgmental Children started expressing an opinion about what I wore. I think they were around eight and ten when they started to give me a hard time about what I wore to work each day.

“You’re not seriously going to wear that shirt, are you?” was a popular comment, as was the perennial question about whether or not I had agreed to wear something for a bet.

Two anecdotes give a pretty accurate depiction of my relationship with my Judgmentals. The first involved a trip we made as a family to San Francisco, around ten years ago. One day, as we were heading out to explore some of the city’s art museums (I have to say, to their credit, that one of the Judgmentals’ most engaging characteristics is her genuine interest in art), it started to rain. Heavily. And as the only shoes I had robust enough to cope with an almost torrential downpour were my training shoes – which, obviously, I only ever wore in the gym – these were the shoes I decided to wear.

Big mistake. No sooner had I re-emerged from the lift wearing my trainers, than Judgmental Child A along with Judgmental Child B said, almost as one, “There is absolutely no way we’re going out with you if you’re going to wear those.”

And they weren’t joking. When I said that I had no other shoes to wear, and the shoes I’d brought to wear “in public” were so slight (penny loafers) they would disintegrate if they were taken out in the rain, they simply shrugged their shoulders and said, “So what?”

Admittedly the shoes were bright blue and, as one of the Judgmentals soon pointed out, made me look not completely unlike a Smurf, but I’m not sure this was really my fault. After all, I had never intended them to be worn in mixed company, in public or indeed in daylight.

Anyway, the denouement was humiliating, to say the least, because I had to spend the next two hours (the duration of the SF downpour) walking ten paces behind my family. And, again, I’m not making this up. When I suggested that it was highly unlikely that either of the Judgmentals were going to bump into anyone who knew them, they again shrugged and resorted to their (by now) default position: “So what?”

A beat.

“You still look ridiculous.”

The second incident happened a few years ago, when Judgmental Child B had finally reached the age when she could wear what she liked to school – which obviously meant her uniform was banished to that part of her wardrobe where she hides all the things she’s stolen from me over the years (David Bowie T-shirts, button badges, baseball caps, phone chargers – literally dozens of phone chargers).

One morning, as she passed me in the hall on her way out, I stopped her in her tracks.

“You’re not going to like this,” I said, with my hands on my hips.

She gave me a sneer.

“What?” she said.

“Well, 30 years ago, probably to the very day, I was wearing exactly the same clothes as you...”

She then gave me an incredulous look, followed by a roll of the eyes and then a curt, “Seriously?”

Oh, yes, I said, and proceeded to reel off the offending items: one blue nylon MA-1 flying jacket, one white T-shirt, one pair of Levi 501s, one logo belt (in her case Gucci, in mine, a 1986 Gucci knockoff), one pair of black Loakes loafers with rubberised soles and finally one pair of extremely white socks.

Predictably Judgmental Child B said I was talking rubbish, pulled on her headphones and promptly stormed off to school.

That night, after some fairly furious rummaging, I produced photographic evidence of our sartorial clash, but after studying it for a good three seconds, Judgmental Child Deux simply threw the picture back at me and went upstairs to her room.

“You look ridiculous,” she said by way of a parting shot.

Of course, I was crestfallen and immediately regretted having spent the best part of an hour looking for the photograph.